Rebeca Andrade: The hug that made the steel nerve athlete give up dropping the gymnastics

After winning gold medal in the general individual at Paris Games, the most award -winning gymnast of all time, American Simone Biles confessed to reporters accompanying the press conference after the proof that a particular opponent had made her nervous.

“I’m tired, she’s too close,” Biles said, referring to Brazilian Rebeca Andrade, silver in the competition.

“No one has never come so close, so it really made me alert and took the best athlete out of me. I’m so excited and proud to compete with her – but I’m getting uncomfortable, guys,” he said with a smile.

Cut for three days later. After the world watched from the tip of the couch Rebeca’s concentrated look while waiting for his turn to compete in the jump test that earned him another silver, a reporter asked what was going through her head at that moment.

“Ah, I was traveling in mayonnaise. I was thinking about the recipes I will make when I return to Brazil,” he replied, with a giggle.

“There was one that was with potatoes and cheese, chicken … has cake, cookie, a lot of things.”

The video went viral instantly.

“I had gone to sleep the day before watching recipe video, it was still in my head,” she remembers three months later to BBC News Brazil.

The report went to Rio de Janeiro to talk to Gymnast, one of the three Brazilian on the list of the 100 most influential women in the BBC, the BBC 100 women.

It was a Saturday when Rebeca appeared for the interview at a hotel in Barra da Tijuca between one commitment and another.

He had just returned from Mexico, where he had traveled at the invitation of the Carolina Herrera brand to watch the brand’s resort 2025 collection parade and boarded that afternoon to Sao Paulo to record with his selection colleagues a campaign for a fashion retailer.

In recent months, the athlete has been reconciling the rigorous training routine with a busy event agenda, between commercial recordings and photo sessions for magazines.

She says she likes this world, but the priorities are clear: “Gymnastics come first. Always come.”

Navigating ups and downs

Rebeca has an unmistakable sweet voice and is always laughing.

This is how, shortly after winning a historic ground gold in Paris and Biles and the American Jordan Chiles bend into reverence for her on the podium, which Rebeca said that instead of the recipes, this time had marathoned the series Grey’s Anatomy The night before the test and dreamed who was a surgeon.

How can one contain anxiety in a pressure situation like an Olympics?

“It was a long journey,” she tells BBC News Brazil.

Any more superficial chronology in the gymnast’s career is a window to the course that made it synonymous with mental resilience at 25.

Rebeca began in the gymnastics at the age of 4, on the outskirts of Guarulhos, where her mother worked in two jobs to support her eight children.

When the opportunity to train professionally, at age 10, she moved to Curitiba, Paraná.

She suffered three serious injuries to her right knee, with the potential to end an athlete’s career, who prevented her from training for eight months.

But he recovered, he competed again – and became the athlete with the largest number of Olympic medals in Brazil.

There are six: two gold, three silver and one bronze; Four of them won at the Paris Games in 2024 – the other two at the Tokyo Olympics.

She is, of course, the protagonist of her own story, but makes a point of remembering that she has never walked alone.

In the conversation with the report, the references to the team, the colleagues of the Brazilian Gymnastics, the family and their spirituality while walking through the ups and downs of life and career are reiterated.

Psychology, for example, has provided many of the tools she uses inside the gym – the best way to breathe, how to think fast when she needs, keep her body firm, without trembling and outside.

Rebeca has been accompanied by the same psychologist since she was 13 and recently became a student of the psychology course at a private university in Rio.

“With the help of my psychologist, Aline (Wolff), I got to know more about my body, understanding the things that worked for me, putting my priorities and doing many exercises to be able to understand and know me,” says the gymnast .

“I think I took 11 years to get everything into practice, and now, with 13 years of therapy, things keep flowing, you know?”

The accompaniment was fundamental for her to overcome the trauma of the second knee injury, when she was determined to leave the sport and could not exchange a word about what had happened.

Breaking the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee is serious. But when it first happened to her, the shock had been smaller. Rebeca was only 16 years old: “Fear was more than I wouldn’t be as good as it was before, you know?”

Seeing herself exactly in the same situation two years later, in 2017, she waged.

“I couldn’t talk, I was really traumatized. I didn’t believe it was happening again … It was a year when I was fine, and it was going to be my first World Cup.”

It was taken out of silence by the psychologist, who released a blunt “Let’s wake up, we need to talk about it” and managed to start the process that allowed her to be a gymnast again.

“I had to talk, that put it out … and the only person who could get it out of me was herself.”

Another central figure in history is the mother of the athlete, Dona Rosa, who, as Rebeca says, despite the tiring routine of work as a maid, has always made a point of being present in the lives of her children, to strengthen their self -esteem and pass the values that thought important.

“Joy comes from my mother todinha, who always sees the positive side of things, even in very difficult times,” he says.

“She didn’t see things like suffering, so we didn’t see it either – we were together, and she always managed to solve things,” he continues.

“People say my brothers and I are very similar. It’s everyone very happy, we respect a lot, want to see everyone well, want to help … and I think it’s because we were created like this – we always It helped if it is easy for us to want to help others as well. “

Rebeca says she was thanks to Dona Rosa that she managed to leave home at age 10 with a maturity that made a difference in a sport where many girls start early, are often away from their families and, therefore, vulnerable.

“My mother trusted the technicians, but she also knew I would tell her anything, regardless of what it was, good or bad,” says Rebeca.

“She created me for that, to speak, to have a mouth, and I used my mouth.”

In a case that shocked the United States, an American gymnastics doctor was sentenced to prison for sexual abuse in 2018 after the testimony of 156 women, including athletes from the team.

In Brazil, a gymnastics technician was convicted in 2022 for vulnerable rape against four victims and currently resorts to freedom.

Rebeca believes that in places like the United States, where there are many high performance athletes in gymnastics and competition for a spot in the selection is fierce, cases of abuse sometimes take to light, because some girls are afraid of if manifest, suffer reprisals and be cut from the team.

“It’s horrible.”

She thinks one of the ways to protect athletes is to have qualified professionals capable of identifying signs of abuse and people at the highest levels of hierarchy opened to “listen.”

“There are a lot of people who do not believe in the word of the child, the teenager. Do not know? Will investigate the facts,” he argues.

“No, give people, you know a traumatized person. You can see the difference from a person who goes through someone who has never passed.”

The only anxiety crisis

In the course of mental health, she recalls a single anxiety crisis. The pivot was the third knee injury, this time in the middle of the Brazilian Championship.

Before resonance, Rebeca already knew she had been injured. He had already cried copiously and even connected to his mother warning that he was going to drop the gym, asking a trucker uncle to get her things in Rio to take Sao Paulo.

Back at the hotel, it was taken by anxiety and, alone, went through a “very difficult” moment.

“I think I needed to live it there, you know, alone, to understand the strength I had.”

When Lorrane Oliveira, her room and selection colleague, returned, she found her “full”, as she likes to say, making fun.

But hours later, late at night, Rebeca woke up suddenly, with a knot in her throat.

At the same time, he thought of his friend, who was going to compete the next day and needed to rest.

“Then I cried like this, you know, softly, only I couldn’t hold right. In thought I said: ‘God, I just wanted a hug. I just wanted to feel welcomed.'”

That’s when she felt her friend sitting in the corner of the bed.

“It was the best hug I’ve ever won in my life. I get goose bumps, because it was very spiritual for me. And there I was sure I wasn’t at my time to stop, that I was going to come back,” she says.

The athletes of the Brazilian Gymnastics team are very united. They hitchhike with each other for training, go out together and support themselves when life squeezes. Rebeca in particular loves to send memes, many.

One of her favorite moments of the Paris Olympics is the team’s podium, Brazil’s first bronze in this category and a moment of celebration that she can share with colleagues.

The other, of course, is the gold medal on the ground. Not just because the best of all time has bowed to her.

“Then I gave my mother an amazing hug. I was very happy she was there, super thrilled, super proud.”

• Gold for Rebeca Andrade: What makes gymnast the largest Olympic athlete in Brazil of all time, according to the coach who discovered her
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• As elite athletes make emotions work in their favor – and what lessons they can give us